Seccom Global bolsters cloud security offer

Seccom Global has bolstered its managed security services offering through partnerships with unified threat management provider Astaro and cloud security provider Zscaler.

The Australian managed security services provider (MSSP), formerly known as Seccom Networks, extended an existing agreement with Astaro to access the vendor's "full range of solutions and services".

However, the primary focus of the revised deal was the Astaro virtual offering, given the growing demand for cloud solutions which enabled customers to avoid hardware purchases.

"[The] Astaro [deal] was driven from demand from the market," Seccom's Global CIO, Gavin Matthews, told CRN. "We have clients that were looking for virtual security and virtual servers.

"They've been downloading the virtual trial, setting it up themselves and towards the end of the 30 day [trial] they say, ‘This is great, where can I buy it'?"

Matthews said Seccom spent nine months doing research and development with Astaro to develop undisclosed "internal features".

"We saw strengths in Astaro's virtual firewall as well as its HTTPS Proxy Filtering, which allows users to filter and control secure web traffic and helps to prevent attacks from SSL tunnelling," he said.

Matthews said the partnership allowed Seccom Global to service a broader market and "offer more flexibility for our channel partners".

Astaro used the announcement to signal its intention to initiate further movements into the Australian market. Guy Coles, vice president Astaro APAC and Japan said in a statement that it saw Seccom Global as a good fit for its expansion plans for Australia.

In other news, Seccom confirmed it had flicked the switch on its partnership with in-the-cloud security provider, Zscaler.

Seccom was the first provider of Zscaler's full cloud security service on the East Coast of Australia. Until now, Zscaler had serviced clients through nodes in Internode's Adelaide data centre.

The partnership enabled Seccom to bolster its security services to include Zscaler's anti-virus and spyware, phishing, web access, URL filtering, web 2.0 applications bandwidth optimisation and data loss prevention and reporting.

"We already provide some in the cloud services, which is our anti-spam, content protection [product] called Securescreen," Seccom's Matthews said.

"What we're doing is expanding that with Zscaler, which gives the client everything they're looking for.

"[Zcaler] have been out and they have met with us. We've deployed their proxy devices into two of our [data centres]."

With the Zscaler deal Seccom will give clients global protection. "We've basically whiteboxed Zscaler. From our perspective we want to do some value add for our clients by bolting on extra services," Matthews said.

Seccom also provided an update on its entry into the US market last year.

Matthews described it as "fairly soggy" but believed the company had made inroads in the past three months, particularly as demand for cloud-based services picked up.